Owen Ouyang

Once again, I’m incredibly grateful for the unwavering support of my advisor, @wchnicholas.bsky.social, and the invaluable contributions of all my co-authors. Thank you for helping bring this idea to life!

GitHub - nicwulab/oPool_display: Antibody library selection Antibody library selection. Contribute to nicwulab/oPool_display development by creating an account on GitHub.

With the help of Cursor Agent/Claude Sonnet 4, we created a locally run user interface for our design pipeline that enables quick and simple design of oligo pool-based native pairing antibody library assemblies. Have fun screening, it's a pool partyyy! :) github.com/nicwulab/oPo...

I'm thrilled to share that the oPool⁺ display is on the cover of this week's #ScienceTranslationalMedicine! We hope that the future use of this platform can accelerate antibody characterization, benefit therapeutic & vaccine development, and facilitate iterative refinements of antibody AI models.

Reaching Out to Senior Scientists: A Step Worth Taking When we start out as early career researchers, we often hesitate to reach out to senior scientists. However, they are often excited to help young scientists. Here, Owen Ouyang discusses how mentorship...

Academia is built on collaboration and mentorship. However, as ECRs, we tend to hesitate to reach out to our seniors. In our latest ecrLife post, @owenouyang.bsky.social encourages young scientists to give it a try, since many seniors are happy to write back and provide advice.
tinyurl.com/35u7hw5h

9 Graduate Student "Rising Stars" smiling in a group photo at the end of a successful symposium

Had a blast listening to exciting science and stories at last week's 4th annual Graduate Student Rising Stars symposium @uofubiochem.bsky.social, topped off by a keynote describing the wonders of cone snail venoms from Toto Olivera. Thanks to all of our visitors and speakers!

I’m grateful for the unwavering support from my advisor @wchnicholas.bsky.social as well as everyone from the Wu Lab. It has been an amazing journey so far, and I’m excited for more to come! We envision a near future where antibody binding characterization is fast, simple, and cost-effective. (14/)

oPool+ display also holds promise for advancing toward the future synergy between machine learning models and experimental systems by enabling rapid validation of prediction results at scale. We believe it represents a starting point for the future of high-throughput antibody biology. (13/)

oPool+ display can be generalized to any antigens of interest as long as they can be recombinantly purified. More importantly, oPool+ display also offers great flexibility in experimental design, as the synthesized library can be stored, reused, and expanded at any time. (12/)

This result suggests that a diverse native pairing library of ~20,000 unique antibody sequences can be assembled in just one 96-well plate PCR reaction, followed by concurrent specificity characterization against 10-20 antigens of choice within days. Such a scale would be truly unprecedented. (11/)

In the update, we tested the limit of our assembly strategy as we increased the # of scFv to assemble in a single PCR. Our one-pot PCR strategy performed amazingly well, as it achieved extremely high reproducibility and coverage even with the assembly of different 200 scFvs in a single tube. (9/)

Through computational design, we overcame this challenge by splitting a defined scFv sequence into fragments and assembling them back through PCR. To ensure precise assembly, we utilized the highly diverse CDR regions to computationally design overlaps that are unique at the nucleotide level. (9/)

The key innovation of oPool+ display lies within the assembly of native paring antibodies, as current technologies does not permit massively parallel oligo synthesis >350nt, which is only 1/3 of the length of a single-chain variable fragment (scFv), the shortest human antibody format. (8/)

We then selected 25 antibodies and thoroughly tested their binding against all 9 HAs by both BLI (using Fab) and ELISA (using IgG). Both validations indicated >70% of true positive rate and >95% of true negative rate, demonstrating the robust performance of oPool+ display. (7/)

Our screening showed that 114 of the 325 antibodies bound to at least one of the nine HA screened, 45 of which were further identified to target the more conserved stem domain through either HA stem screens or binding competition with CR9114, a known HA stem antibody. (6/n)

As a proof-of-concept, we applied oPool+ display to rapidly synthesize >300 uncharacterized and uncommon influenza hemagglutinin (HA) antibodies and measure their binding to 9 HA variants through 16 different screens. Over 5,000 binding tests were performed in < 5 days. (5/)

To address this, we combined oligo pool synthesis with mRNA display to synthesize and screen antibodies with defined sequences at scale. Compared to the conventional approaches, our platform is significantly faster (~3-5 days), costs ~80-90% less, and only requires one person to perform it. (4/)

Considering that hundreds to thousands of natively paired antibody sequences can usually be isolated in a clinical study, this process would often take dedicated research teams weeks to months to complete and cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. A bottleneck clearly exists. (3/)

Antibody discovery is crucial to developing therapeutics and understanding adaptive immunity. However, despite years of research, the characterization of monoclonal antibodies today remains low throughput, as it involves cloning, expressing, and characterizing each antibody one by one (2/)

High-throughput synthesis and specificity characterization of natively paired antibodies using oPool+ display Antibody discovery is crucial for developing therapeutics and vaccines as well as understanding adaptive immunity. However, the lack of approaches to synthesize antibodies with defined sequences in a ...

In this updated manuscript, now available on bioRxiv, we are excited to (re)introduce oPool+ display, a high-throughput cell-free platform that enables rapid synthesis and specificity characterization of natively paired antibodies at an unprecedented scale: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/)

world map with pins showing the locations of E life ambassadors

1/ From Brazil to South Korea, we’re excited to welcome 107 early-career researchers who are looking to promote responsible behaviours in science to the eLife Community Ambassador programme 🎉
https://buff.ly/3EYNfmE

OK, #immunology Bluesky LFG!

If, like me, you're trying to reconstruct the vibrant scientific network we had at the other place, these starter packs are a great start:

go.bsky.app/2bqX3T7
go.bsky.app/PY5tCas
go.bsky.app/FmERUoD
go.bsky.app/AjNpW2h
go.bsky.app/SinqoJU
go.bsky.app/DmphBCT